Clapton_ The Autobiography - Eric Clapton [13]
Around that time I met, and followed around for a while, an American female folk singer named Gina Glaser. She was the first American musician I had been anywhere near, and I was starstruck. To make a little extra money, she posed naked for still life classes at Kingston Art School. She had a young child, and a slightly world-weary aura to her. Her specialty was old Civil War songs like “Pretty Peggyo” and “Marble Town.” She had a beautiful, clear voice and played an immaculate clawhammer style. I was smitten with her, and I think she found me attractive, but she was twice my age, and I was still pretty green around women.
As my playing improved, I started to go to a pub in Kingston called the Crown, where I used to play in a corner by the billiard table. This particular pub attracted a suave crowd of beat people, who seemed a cut above the kind of music fans I’d been hanging out with. This was an affluent crowd. The guys wore Chelsea boots, leather jackets, matelot shirts, and Levi 501s, which were incredibly hard to find—and a kind of harem of very-good-looking girls moved around with them. Bardot was then the icon for women to follow, so their uniform was tight jumpers, slit skirts, and black stockings with duffel coats and scarves.
They were very exotic, very fast, and very well educated, a tight group of friends who seemed to have grown up together. They’d usually meet at the pub, then go off to hang out at someone’s house, and there always seemed to be a party going on around them. It became my ambition to be accepted by this group, but since I was an outsider from the word go, and working-class, the only way I could really get their attention was by playing the guitar.
Hanging out with this bunch, and especially seeing all these beautiful girls, really made me want to belong, but I had no idea how to go about it. When I was still at secondary modern, a friend of mine, Steve, one of the lads from Send who was into clothes and looking cool, took me out on a blind date. I was obviously elected to divert his girlfriend’s mate, who wasn’t the most beautiful girl in the world. I wasn’t interested in her at all, but I was very horny, and although I wouldn’t kiss her, I did try to get my hands on her upper torso. She wasn’t amused and created a bit of a scene. That was as far as I got with sex until Diane at Hollyfield, and we hadn’t got much further. I was terrified of going too far and then being held responsible in some way. Ever since finding that pornography on the Green, I felt compelled to discover for myself what it was all about, but my experience of female rejection, stemming from my mother, left me quaking with fear at the threshold.
At Kingston, I set my sights on a girl who was completely out of my league. I think she was the daughter of a local politician from Chessington. Her name was Gail, and she was absolutely gorgeous, dark-skinned, tall, and voluptuous, with long, dark, curly hair.
She seemed very aloof when I first saw her, but after I had observed her for a few weeks, I could see that she was also pretty wild. I quickly became obsessed with her, and somehow got it into my head that the best way to get her attention was by regularly getting blind drunk, as if that would make me more appealing or more manly in some way. On any given night in Kingston, I would be drinking up to ten pints of Mackeson’s milk stout, followed by rum and black currant, gin and tonic, or gin and orange. I learned to try and drink so that I’d stop just short of passing out, but I would invariably end up getting very ill and throwing up. Needless to say, as a courting tool it failed miserably. Gail was not impressed, but if nothing else, I was learning a lot about the power of alcohol.
Only a short time before this, I had gone with three friends on the train to Beaulieu for the jazz festival. We got there on a Saturday morning and were planning